XOXO Fest is a nerdy, techy, creative festival in Portland that ran for a few years that a few Song Fight participants went to (Jonathan Mann, Brad Sucks, JB, maybe more?). After the 2016 festival they announced they were taking a break. Now it's back, September 6-9. If you've been, what was it like? Anybody interested in going? Maybe we can put together a Song Fight contingent.

Registration is open for 10 days. Registration involves signing in with Twitter, then providing some details about what kind of creative endeavors you are involved in. They just want to confirm that folks who want attend are creative people who are actively making things, not verifying that you are cool enough (or so they claim).

Ah dang, sorry to hear you won't be there. I bought my ticket. I'm still not 100% sure I'll go, not sure how fun it'd be to go by myself and not know anybody, but the tickets are fully refundable till August 17th so I figured I'd buy it and see how things panned out till then.

XOXO was amazing. I felt like I was in a very wonderful alternative reality full of nothing but nice, open, sensitive, smart, funny, creative people. I highly recommend it to anybody here if there is a chance for you to go in the future.

I thought I would mention some of the people that I met or found out about there. Some of these folks have been online a long time so are not going to be new to everybody, even though they were new to me.

The first one is Bill Wurtz, he is a musician/humorist/absurdist/visual artist/and more. They played a medley of his videos and I was floored by the musicianship and also how odd and hilarious they are. He hass very unique specific weird musical and visual styles.

This is a recent one which is now really stuck in my head.

These are two of his longest and most viewed videos:

Here's another good one more in the style of the first, rather than the longer more educational videos:

He has tons of videos that are 3-10 seconds long, too. It's kind of annoying to click and view each one individually on YouTube, maybe best to use a playlist or "play all" or something.

He was at the festival and they did a Q&A after this videos played. It was a bit of a trainwreck. It was hard to tell if he was just a shy person who felt uncomfortable being confronted with people who were gushing about his work and then asking questions about his process, or if he was a dismissive person who was rude at best or a jerk at worst.

I’ve been a fan of Bill Wurtz for ages and I’m happy to see him get more attention. Given the way he carries himself online I assume he’s just incredibly shy and introverted and doesn’t know how to handle the attention.

fluffy wrote:I’ve been a fan of Bill Wurtz for ages and I’m happy to see him get more attention. Given the way he carries himself online I assume he’s just incredibly shy and introverted and doesn’t know how to handle the attention.

Yeah, I was debating it a bit a couple other folks and was lobbying them toward giving him the benefit of the doubt. There seemed to be a fairly wide divide between the speakers/presenters, half/half folks from either end of the spectrum of comfort in front of an audience. I think he was just on the "not comfortable" side.

These folks apparently were at XOXO in 2016. I didn't attend and they weren't present this year, but, it's something I just heard about while at XOXO 2018. This is a series of six amazing videos called "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared". Starts off cloying and cutesy, gets dark and disturbing. So good!